It was just a couple of months ago that a magazine article revealed a similar kind of personal backstabbing among the ranks of General McChrystal’s staff when he was in charge of the war in Afghanistan. The comments – including one particularly acerbic dig at the vice president — were like political dynamite.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressGen. Stanley A. McChrystal reviewed troops for the last time at a retirement ceremony

Within hours, Mr. McChrystal was on a long and lonely plane ride back to Washington, where he got his walking papers from Mr. Obama in a brief Oval Office meeting. The president said later that the comments in the article had undermined “the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system.”

General McChrystal has retired and is now teaching a class on leadership at Yale University. (My colleague Thom Shanker reports that the Army’s inspector general has found that the most egregious remarks quoted by Rolling Stone did not come from General McChrystal or his top aides.)

So what’s different this time?

If anything, the recriminations in Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars,” are more numerous, more substantive and more personal than the ones in the Rolling Stone article about General McChrystal. Rather than a few off-color comments from military subordinates, the Woodward book details personal animosities among the president’s most senior advisers.

It is, in fact, just the kind of thing that the president publicly ordered his staff not to engage in during Rose Garden remarks after firing General McChrystal.

“I’ve just told my national security team that now is the time for all of us to come together,” Mr. Obama said. “Doing so is not an option, but an obligation. I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division. All of us have personal interests; all of us have opinions. Our politics often fuels conflict, but we have to renew our sense of common purpose and meet our responsibilities to one another, and to our troops who are in harm’s way, and to our country.”

But it seems unlikely that the president will start firing many of his senior aides in the wake of Mr. Woodward’s book.

In part, that’s because some are already leaving. With the midterm elections just six weeks away, there’s a natural exodus about to take place. Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is all but out the door to run for mayor of Chicago. There’s already been talk of the eventual departure of Gen. Jim Jones, the national security adviser. The two-year mark is a natural moment to leave.

But the lack of punishment is also a reflection of the White House’s decision to cooperate with Mr. Woodward. It would seem to be hard for Mr. Obama to punish his top advisers after giving them official clearance to be candid in their interviews with the author.

Still, the internal reverberations are likely to continue for some time, as the West Wing, the Pentagon and the State Department digest the personal remarks in the book and adjust accordingly.

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